The issue here isn’t individuals using AI to make art, you can make AI art to your hearts content, print it out, frame it. I don’t care.

Problem is a bunch of companies are trying to replace artists with AI. AI doesn’t create original art, or collages art from other artists together. This means if, for example, Raytheon used AI to make an add, and a big chunk of that ad is from a painting I made, I can’t object to a piece of my art being used to sell bombs.

Even collage art made by actual humans doesn’t get used in corporate advertising much for the same reason, if an artist sees their work being used in the college they may object to it. This is less a problem with independent artists. I actually make college art myself.

And while I love showing it to people I’m very hesitant to use it in any context where I may directly profit from it cuz I wouldn’t want to offend any of the people who made the original images. I doubt it would happen cuz generally I take material from advertising and change the context enough that the original creator probably wouldn’t recognize it. Thing is I’m a human, I can understand that context and make a judgment call about it, and other humans can object if they disagree with my judgment about it and try and hold me accountable. An AI wouldn’t be able to do that.

I’d have less objections to AI art if it was always clearly watermarked (which China is apparently trying to do) and it was always clear who the person who generated it was, but right now AI is just pumping out tons of images with no way for artists to know if their images were used in it and who’s profiting from it.